Odysseys home
Subtitle: mapping African-Canadian literature
By: George Elliott Clarke.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Toronto; Buffalo
Language: eng
Number of pages: 491
Subjects: Canadian literature -- Black authors -- History and criticism.; French Canadian literature -- Black authors -- History and criticism.; Canadian literature -- Black authors -- Bibliography.; Africans -- Canada -- Intellectual life.; Blacks -- Canada -- Intellectual life.; Africans in literature.; Blacks in literature.
Genres: Bibliography.
Description: "Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging collection of essays and reviews presents a history of African-Canadian literature and examines its debt to, and synthesis with, oral cultures.

George Elliott Clarke identifies the literature's distinguishing characteristics, argues for its relevance to both African Diasporic and Canadian Studies, and critiques several of its key creators and texts.".

"Scholarly and sophisticated, the survey cites and interprets the works of several major African-Canadian writers, including Andre Alexis, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Claire Harris, and M. NourbeSe Philip. In so doing, Clarke demonstrates that African-Canadian writers and critics explore the tensions that exist between notions of universalism and black nationalism, liberalism and conservatism.

These tensions are revealed in the literature that Clarke argues to be - paradoxically - uniquely Canadian and proudly apart from a mainstream national identity."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [449]-475) and index.
Table of contents: title: Contesting a model blackness: a meditation on African-Canadian African Americanism, or the structures of African-Canadianité; title: Must all blackness be America? Locating Canada in Borden's 'Tightrope time, ' or nationalizing Gilroy's The black Atlantic; title: The career of black English in Nova Scotia: a literary sketch; title: The birth and rebirth of Africadian literature; title: Syl Cheney-Coker's Nova Scotia, or the limits of pan-Africanism; title: Toward a conservative modernity: cultural nationalism in contemporary Acadian and Africadian poetry; title: Liberalism and its discontents: reading black and white in contemporary Québécois texts; title: Treason of the black intellectuals?; title: Canadian biraciality and its 'zebra' poetics; title: Clarke versus Clarke: Tory elitism in Austin Clarke's short fiction; title: Harris, Philip, Brand: three authors in search of literate criticism; title: No language is neutral: seizing English for ourselves; title: The complex face of black Canada; title: Viewing African Canada; title: The death and rebirth of Africadian nationalism; title: An unprejudiced view of two Africadian poets; title: Reading Ward's "Blind man's blues'; title: African-islanders; title: Another great thing; title: Growing up black in Alberta; title: Toward a black women's Canadian history; title: Love which is insight; title: The outraged citizen-poet speaks out; title: A primer of African-Canadian literature; title: Africana Canadiana: a select bibliography of literature by African-Canadian authors, 1785-2001, in English, French, and translation.